My CNBC Energy Opportunities Interview (VIDEO)

Update October 2014: CNBC finally took down their Energy Opportunities website and videos. I’ve got a recording of my clip above. Unfortunately, the quality is much worse than the CNBC quality was, but here it is:

I noted about a month and a half ago that I was going to be interviewed for CNBC and Harvard Business Review’s Energy Opportunities series. I was interviewed about a month ago now, at CNBC’s studios in London, and the video has just been published.

Of course, while I actually spoke for about 10-15 minutes, CNBC cut it down to a more attention-span-friendly 2 minutes or so. There’s stuff I would have liked them to have kept in, but I think that they did quite a good job overall and chose some of the most important segments to feature.

Overall, it’s not a pleasure to watch myself on video, and I’m not quite used to discussing these matters verbally. But, hey, what can you do?…

In the possibility and hope that this video would be watched by more than just people interested in and knowledgeable about energy (and clean energy, in particular), I wanted to focus on a few points that I thought were most important for most people to understand:

Inaction (in the case of climate change and peak oil) would be several times more expensive than the cost of changing over to a clean energy economy as fast as possible.

We have the technology we need. We have it today! All we need to do is suck it up and get this technology deployed (with strong government policies, innovative programs and businesses, and our own wallets).

Clean energy is not just about the environment (meaning: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the climate we’re used to). Decentralized, clean electricity is good for local economies and individuals’ pocketbooks.

Also, knowing that repetition is key to people remembering anything, I emphasized these points a few times in the course of the interview and am quite happy that some of them were repeated in the course of the 2-minute video.

So, now, here’s the video, followed by some of the things I discussed that were left out:

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As I said above, I didn’t expect CNBC to include ALL of my points. I knew the video would be shortened. Luckily, though, I’ve got a blog where I can share more. Other points I know or am quite sure I mentioned (sometimes multiple times) include:

Solar leasing also offers great opportunities for people who don’t have the opportunity to (or don’t want to) invest in a solar power system of their own. Basically, with solar leasing, you can cut your electricity bill down from day one and be saving money from there on out. (Of course, it involves giving up some of the long-term profits from installing solar to someone else.)

With dirty energy costs continually rising (and already too expensive if you take externalities into account), the future is clearly clean energy.. the question is just how fast we get to the future.

People support clean energy! The only things holding us back from a faster transition to clean energy are the power of the fossil fuel industry over our political systems and the public not pushing politicians to do more (and, of course, politicians not doing more on their own).

I think I covered much more than that, but those were some of the other key points.

Hope you find the video and my follow-up comments here useful. If so, sharing with more people than just your niche “energy circle” would be greatly appreciated.

About the Author

Zachary Shahan Zach is tryin' to help society help itself (and other species). He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director and chief editor. He's also the president of Important Media and the director/founder of EV Obsession and Solar Love. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, and Canada.
Zach has long-term investments in TSLA, FSLR, SPWR, SEDG, & ABB — after years of covering solar and EVs, he simply has a lot of faith in these particular companies and feels like they are good cleantech companies to invest in. But he offers no professional investment advice and would rather not be responsible for you losing money, so don't jump to conclusions.

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